A. Grice's definition (as simplified by
Lycan):

S intended that A form the belief that P (in part) because of A's
recognition that (1)

B. Objections that the Conditions are Not
Necessary

Objection 1: No Audience Required

It seems that I can meaningfully utter a sentence without having an
audience. Examples:

soliloquies

talking to yourself (I do this in the car all the time)

Grice's response: counterfactual intentions. S utters x intending
that if there were an audience A, they would form the belief that P;
they would recognize that S intends this; and their forming P would be
because they recognize this.

(One might suggest that in these cases S = A, but it doesn't seem
that in most cases S intends to produce beliefs in him- or herself.)

Objection 2: No Intention to Produce
Belief by Means of Intention

Two cases:

Intend to produce belief, but not because of this very
intention: conclusion of argument. I present an argument with
conclusion C. I want A to form the belief that C, so condition 1 is
satisfied. Probably condition 2 is also satisfied. But condition 3
seems not to be satisfied. I don't want my audience to believe C
because they recognize my intention that they come to have this
belief; rather, I want them to come to believe it because the
argument is so compelling.

Don't intend to produce belief at all: answering questions
during an oral exam. The examiner already has the relevant beliefs,
so there is no intention to produce them. In this case condition 1
is not met.

Response: weaken the conditions again. Perhaps S intends only that A
should form the belief that S believes P.

C. Objections that the Conditions are Not
Sufficient

Objection 3: Uttering Nonsense

Ziff: "Ugh blugh blugh ugh blugh." Uttered to express contempt. S
intends that A form the belief that S feels contempt; S intends that A
recognize that S has this intention; and S intends A to form the belief
that S feels contempt because they recognize S's intention that they
form this belief. Nevertheless, it doesn't seem that S's utterance means
that S feels contempt.

(You could say that S is communicating his or her contempt, but not
by saying something that means "I feel contempt." Compare: I hit my
thumb with a hammer and say "ouch" I may communicate that I'm in pain,
but "ouch" does not mean "I'm in pain": it expresses pain, it doesn't
state that I'm in pain.)

Objection 4: Kennst du das Land . . .

The American soldier who tries to convince his Italian captors that
he is German by uttering the only sentence of German he knows. Satisfies
the conditions (with P = "I am a German soldier") but he doesn't seem to
mean that he is a German soldier. (Certainly that's not the linguistic
meaning of the sentence he utters! But it also not what he means by
the sentence: he doesn't know what the sentence means, but he hopes
the Germans will understand it to mean whatever it means in German.)

General Issue
about the Definition of Speaker Meaning

The general idea that what a speaker means must
be explainable in terms of the speaker's intentions and beliefs seems
plausible (to me, anyway!). What is strange about Grice's view is the
attempt to explain speaker meaning without any reference to the semantic
meaning of the sentences used.

Of course, that's because Grice wants to explain
the linguistic meaning of sentences in terms of speaker meaning, so to
avoid circularity he can't use linguistic meaning in his explanation of
speaker meaning. But isn't there something backward about this? Well,
let's see . . . on to the definition of sentence meaning!

II. Defining Sentence
Meaning in terms of Speaker Meaning

A. First attempt at
a definition:

A sentence E of a natural language L means that P if
and only if, when speakers of L utter E, they normally speaker-mean that P.

B. Obstacles to the
Definition

Obstacle 1:
Glyting elly beleg and Gleeg gleeg gleeg

Q: what's the point of this "obstacle"? What
Lycan seems to have in mind is that in fact sentence meaning constrains
speaker meaning: I can't express the proposition that P by uttering
sentence S unless S actually means that P. (I may be able to express or
communicate P by using S, but P still won't be what S means when
I utter it.)

How is this a criticism of the above definition
of sentence meaning? I think L's point is that it seems backward: it
seems that sentence-meaning constrains what speakers can mean; if so,
then it looks as though trying to define sentence-meaning in terms of
speaker-meaning goes the wrong way around, or is circular.

Obstacle 2:
Sentences that are Never Uttered

Most sentences of English, for example, never
have been and never will be uttered. So there's no way to define their
meaning in terms of what people usually speaker-mean by them.

Obstacle 3:
Novel Sentences

The first time a sentence is uttered, its
meaning is already determined: we don't need to wait to find out what
speaker-meaning is statistically most often associated with it.

(At least, I think this is Lycan's point
with this objection.)

Obstacle 4:
Nonliteral Uses

Metaphor, colloquialisms, hyperbole, etc. -- we
often use sentences to communicate things other than their literal
meanings. But then if we tried to analyze sentence meaning as what
people usually speaker-mean by a sentence, we might get the result that
sentences mean something other than their literal meaning.

C. Revising the
Definition

An unstructured expression x means that P in S's idiolect
if and only if S has in his or her repertoire the following procedure: to
utter x if for some audience A, S intends A to believe that S believes that
P.

An unstructured expression x means that P in the dialect of
a group G if and only if:

many members of G have in their repertoires the procedure of
uttering x if, for some A, they want A to believe that they believe that
P;

they will continue to retain this procedure in their repertoire only
if other members of G have the same procedure.

A structured expression x means that P in the dialect of a group G
if and only if . . . ?????

(At this point Grice appeals to a resultant procedure that is
constructed somehow out of the basic procedures so far mentioned. But
the resultant procedure has to be abstract, because it will never be
realized for most sentences of the language.)